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Greetings everyone.

Well, my life has changed. Or, I guess, more accurately, my life has been changed.

It’s such a profound change that I can’t help but think of this brief iconic and memorable scene from the movie The Graduate.

Although Benjamin pretty much ignored the one word spoken to him on the patio, I did not do so with the two words spoken to me. They have been truly lifechanging…at least so far.

The two words: Grok Bot

I was talking to our eldest son on Sunday. He told me about his experience with Grok Bot. It had cleaned up all his email accounts, reviewed documents, and even helped with a tax return he was struggling with. He said he was so fired up about it that he plunked down $300 for a year’s subscription on the spot.

I decided to give it a try. And to my surprise, I discovered I was already paying for it through my X (nee Twitter) subscription. So I plunged in,

I decided to try it on an old email account. One I had used for at least 20 years. I’ve abandoned it, but it still keeps sending me emails that I never read. And it costs me ~$20 per month. Why haven’t I gotten rid of it?

I’ve had it so long and have it tied to so many accounts that I’ve worried about abandoning it. As always seems to happen, I try to login to some account I haven’t been on in forever, and the site wants me to enter my username and password. Which I dutifully enter. Then it tells me it will send a code to my ancient email account. Had I not kept the old account, who knows what I would have had to do to gain access to these sites.

This has happened enough times that it keeps me forking over the 20 bucks every month.

So I decided to let Giles (the name I gave to my Grok Bot) make a run through this old account and let me know what it found.

You may be wondering where the name Giles came from. When I was in college an opportunity fell my way. I was offered at least ten thousand books if I would just come take them away. It’s a long story that I don’t need to go into now. But I transported all these books via multiple trips to the little guest house I was renting. The books were stacked floor to ceiling with paths through them so I could get to the bathroom, kitchen, etc. It turned out to be a nightmare.

In this giant pile of books – many of them from the 1800s – I found one called The Cloister and the Hearth written by Charles Reade and published in 1861 about a young man who went on a hero’s journey in the 1400s. The book started out describing his family. His youngest brother was a malignant dwarf named Giles. I had never heard the name before reading it in this book. I’ve since met a number of Gileses. But the Giles of the book stuck in my mind.

Giles was quite the kid. He loved to hang by his teeth on the edge of the table to frighten his mother.

I’ve always remembered the name. I didn’t want to use it on one of our kids, so I decided to use it to name my bot.

Giles ran through close to 50,000 emails in no time and provided me with his report.

I said “delete them all.” Which Giles did.

After this, which was a task I meant to do myself, but was dreading, I decided to step out a bit more.

I gave Giles the following prompt:

Here is what he came up with in pretty short order. I was astonished.

If someone had asked me how many browser tabs I had open, I would have guessed a couple hundred. Maybe three hundred max. But never 485.

Then he came up with this.

Followed by this.

And finally, and most amazingly, this:

The above was sweet music to my soul. He listed every one of the tabs by content along with a link. I could then close all 430 unique tabs and still have them all available and categorized. On my browser they were spread all over the place, and I would spend way more time than I needed to to find the one I was looking for.

This one task that I can assign to Giles weekly will truly change my life.

Humor break…

Every morning right after I wake up, I grab a coffee and sit in the early morning sun. While there, I do a quick run through a few internet sites on my phone. One site I glance through is Medium, which feeds me info the algorithm has picked for me. Usually articles on books, the war in Ukraine, and tech stuff. One of today’s articles was on what to do if your Mac freezes up on you.

I had to laugh.

Twelve tabs open?!?! Piker.

Back to Giles…

Lumen

The Lumen is a little hand-held device you blow into that calculates your respiratory quotient (RQ), which basically tells you how much fat and or carb you’re burning. It’s a measurement usually used in studies and not available to the average Joe. When I was in the middle of dealing with my cancer, I used it multiple times per day to make sure my ketogenic diet was working.

The deal with the Lumen is that when you buy it, you get a year’s subscription to the service. Since I have had NED for nine months now (just got my latest 0.00 tumor burden test back), I have used it way less.

I got a hot comment from a reader a few weeks ago about my promoting the Lumen in The Arrow.

I never heard back as to what the issue was. But it may have had something to do with trying to cancel the contract with Lumen. They don’t make it easy.

I thought I had mine canceled a couple of months ago, then MD says to me this morning, “I thought you canceled your Lumen account.” I told her I had. She was just going through our credit card statements and said a charge for Lumen was on there a couple of weeks ago.

This is a job for Giles, says I. So I put it to him. I gave him the Lumen site and my login credentials. In no time, he solved the problem. And even wrote an email for me to send to them to cancel. Which I did. And they tried to sell me a reduced fee for the next year, which I refused.

They then sent me a letter telling me my account was canceled.

What Giles discovered that I didn’t know, is that you have to cancel via the app on your phone, not online. Which is weird, if you ask me. In their FAQ section, they say you can keep using the Lumen even if you cancel. The company just won’t keep your records for you. I don’t need them to keep my records. I took a screenshot of every reading I took.

They also say that you need to cancel via the app, but don’t give you any kind of link to do it. Giles was wrong about canceling through the app, but he figured it out. You need to do it via email.

They do tell you that you can continue using their product if you cancel; they just don’t tell you how to cancel.

The Lumen device is really a nice piece of technology. I’ve seen several studies in which it was used to determine RQ. It’s a shame the company is so deceitful by hiding the way in which the monthly fee can be turned off.

Giles fixed it for me. If you’ve got a Lumen and want to stop the monthly fees, simply email to customer service: [email protected]

Tell them you want to cancel. They’ll write back trying to give you a discount for a year. Tell them no, you want to cancel, and that should put paid to it. It did for me.

Yet Another Problem Solved

I’ve been having some issues with the platform on which I write The Arrow. Probably more to do with my lack of understanding of the technical lingo. I put Giles on the case, and he had it solved in just a few minutes.

After just using Giles for a day, it’s difficult for me to think of life without him. I have a number of other projects for him, but I’ve got to get this edition of The Arrow published first.

If you need a personal assistant, give Grok Bot a try. It has certainly made a huge difference for me. Go to this link if you’re interested. I have no financial affiliation at all with Grok Bot, other than the fact that I pay them for it

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Can Sunlight Improve Your Vision?

Sunlight does more than provide light for us to see by. Some of the sun’s wavelengths are invisible, and some can travel farther into the body than we might expect. A 2025 paper in Scientific Reports explores a striking possibility: could sunlight shining on a person’s back improve how well that person sees the next day?

Before we get into all this, I’ve got to comment on all the poll responses, comments, and emails I’m getting asking about all kinds of issues related to various wave lengths of light. I’m just plodding through all this myself, so I don’t have all the answers. And I don’t want to BS people into thinking I do. There is a vast literature on all this, and I’m working my way through it. And like all literature, some is pretty solid while some isn’t. I’m working to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So, hang in there with me as I explore the subject. I find it totally fascinating and much in keeping with my own ideas about health. Anything we evolved along with is bound to provide some sort of benefit. It’s just a matter of teasing it all out from the fairly massive volume of info out there.

Years ago, I read a book by a New York doctor that was old even then titled Strong Medicine. The doctor’s name was Blake Donaldson, and he had spent an afternoon with the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Stefansson persuaded Donaldson that an all-meat diet was not only not dangerous, but was an antidote to bad health. Donaldson started putting his patients, who had an array of medical issues, on an almost all-meat diet. They got better. Donaldson ended up writing about it in his book.

One of my favorite quotes from the book is the following:

Based on all my recent reading about the advantages of sunlight, I would amend that quote to read:

During the millions of years that our ancestors lived by hunting, every weakling who could not maintain perfect health on fresh meat, water, and sunlight was bred out.

Okay, on to the study at hand.

The paper in question titled Longer wavelengths in sunlight pass through the human body and have a systemic impact which improves vision is a bit misleading. When we think of vision, we think of an eye chart and 20/20 vision. This is not the type of visual improvement this study demonstrates.

Remember in your high school biology course how you learned about the rods and cones in your eyes? These rods and cones are photoreceptors in the retina of your eyes. They convert the light that enters your eyes into electrical signals through a process called phototransduction. This is the process that allows you to see.

The retina, containing these rods and cones, also contains the most dense population of mitochondria in the body. As the authors of this article state:

Among other things, the authors wanted to see if sunlight penetrates the human body, and, if so, what wavelengths actually go through. Studies have shown sunlight improves mitochondrial function in animals; they wanted to see if it does so in humans as well.

Before we go on, I’ve got to tell you that the experiments written up in this study were performed on a small number of subjects. We probably need a few more studies with a larger number of subjects to be sure the findings are reproducible. But what they found is pretty fascinating. And it was found in all subjects. It was not one of these studies in which 11 subjects out of 20 have a positive finding, while the other 9 out of 20 don’t.

Here is how the first part of this study was done.

Researchers led by Glen Jeffery of University College in London found that certain wavelengths of sunlight could be detected after passing through the human chest. They did so by having 7 male subjects with a median age of 37 expose their bare backs to the sun at 1:00 pm in mid–June in London. Remember, they did this in London. If you look at the latitude of London, there is no major city in the continental United States that has as northerly a latitude as London. You have to go to Canada to find cities with comparable latitudes, Alberta and Calgary, to name two.

Sun in London on a bare back is not the same as sun on a bare back in, say, St. Louis or Dallas. Sun exposure in those two US cities in mid-June would be vastly more intense than sun beating down on London.

The subjects had aluminum (or aluminium, as the Brits say) contraptions attached to the fronts of their bodies that had two functions: one was to house the measuring instruments; the other was to prevent any of the sun's rays hitting the fronts of their bodies.

Once set up in the London sun, the subjects underwent 3 minutes of midday sun exposure on their naked backs.

The instruments housed under the aluminum picked up some of the sun's rays coming out the other side. In other words, three minutes of London sun hit their backs and penetrated through their chests, and were picked up by instruments on the other side.

The amounts picked up by the instruments were tiny, but still… How much would have penetrated if these subjects had been in the sun in Dallas in mid-June for 20 minutes? We don’t know, but I would suspect a lot.

As you can see from the graphic, what emerged from the other side wasn’t a lot. But there was some sunlight that penetrated completely through the chest. And, as you can see from my underlining in red, it was found in all subjects.

As you may recall from the last Arrow, the visual spectrum of sunlight stretches from 380 nm to 780 nm. (A nanometer (nm) is one-billionth of a meter, so they are very small.) The graphic below shows the range of light in wavelengths that hit the exposed backs and the amount that made it through.

The blue line you see is the wavelengths of the sunlight that fell on the bare backs. The red line represents the wavelengths that made it through the thorax. Below is the same image, but with my markups.

There is a lot going on in the graphic above due to my additions.

My additions are the red vertical lines demarcating the visible spectrum of sunlight. The two little vertical green lines on the left show the UVB spectrum, the rays that cause sunburn. And the violet or purple band running from left to right represents the typical spectrum of home LED lighting.

As you can see from the green lines, the three minutes the subjects spent in direct sunlight didn’t expose them to any risk for sunburn. Much of the UVB is filtered out of sunlight at high latitudes.

Since, as we discussed in the last Arrow, the sun, fire, and incandescent lighting have similar spectrums of light, you can see that perhaps firelight and incandescent lighting might also penetrate the body. Which is a good thing, as we will see.

LED lighting, represented by the violet horizontal band, barely picks up any of the longer, body-penetrating wavelengths of light, most of which is outside the visible spectrum. You are not likely to get much light reaching your mitochondria via LED lighting.

The wavelengths of the light actually penetrating the body are shown below. The red vertical line I placed on the chart shows the average maximal wave lengths that made it through: ~800 nm to 875 nm.

The authors then used LED lighting with a wavelength of 850 nm to perform their next experiment.

Vision improvement

The authors of this paper claim that the light penetrating the body energizes the mitochondria and makes them more functional. Which is a very good thing. But how do they know the mitochondria are energized and working better? That is a tough thing to measure.

They do this by measuring what they call visual improvement. But it’s not the kind of visual improvement that lets you throw away your glasses or contacts. It’s not the eye chart kind of visual improvement.

Remember the rods and cones I mentioned above? They are present in great abundance in the retina of the eye, and they perceive color. The retina is rich in mitochondria, and when these mitochondria are working better, the ability to differentiate colors improves.

It’s a sad fact of life, but as we get older our mitochondria don’t work as well as they did years before. The function can be measured by a change in ability to differentiate colors. Color differentiation is the only way, as far as I know, at least, to measure mitochondrial function.

Researchers use a machine that shows a square of color with a number with almost the same color embedded into it. The person being tested is asked to read the number within the square. If the number is the same color as the background, it isn’t visible. But as the researcher turns a knob to make tiny changes in the color of the number, it ultimately appears and can be read.

The less the examiner has to change the color between the number and the background before the subject can read it, the better the mitochondria are working. And, obviously, the opposite applies.

Since the experiment with the sunlight showed which wavelengths penetrated the best (800 nm to 875 nm), the researchers used those in an LED designed to project 850 nm light waves. These are not part of the visual spectrum, so they can’t be seen by the subjects, but they do penetrate the body.

(A quick note on LEDs. LEDs can be set to project pretty much any wavelength of light. As discussed in last week’s Arrow, typical home and office lighting just incorporates most of the visual spectrum, which is only about 10 percent of the total spectrum of sunlight (or firelight or incandescent light). By just replicating the narrow band of visible light, it takes much less electricity to power an LED than it does an incandescent bulb throwing off the full spectrum of visible light. An LED set to project 850 nm wavelength light is not the same as an LED you might use in your home.)

Here is how the next experiment worked.

Different subjects than the ones in the first experiment above were exposed to 850 nm light on their backs from a distance of 1.5 meters for 15 minutes in a darkened room. These subjects were given the background/number differential test before they got the 850 nm LED light shined on them, then again after. An improvement in color differentiation would imply an improvement in mitochondrial function.

All the subjects experienced improvement.

Since 850 nm light hitting the retina increases mitochondrial function as expressed in improved color differentiation, the implication is that the rays of sunlight that penetrate the body improve mitochondrial function in places other than the retina. We just can’t measure mitochondrial function in, say, muscle the same way we can in the retina.

Clever readers may be wondering if the light hitting the retinas of the subjects involved came from the LED’s 850 nm rays into their eyes. They were in a darkened room and the 850 nm are not in the visible spectrum of light. But the authors had already thought that one through and took measures as follows:

As it turned out, those who did not have their heads covered had better color differentiation than did those who had their heads covered. But all subjects improved over measurements taken before the experiment started. Which demonstrates, at least to me, that the 850 nm light shining only the back still improved retinal mitochondrial function and, by extension, probably improved mitochondrial function everywhere.

A third part of the study looks at how near infrared light (NIF as they call it) can easily pass through clothing. The graphic below shows how much 850 nm wavelength light goes through clothing. The researchers put a T-shirt covered with a regular shirt covered with a woolen sweater. Three layers of clothing.

What you’re seeing here is the same three T-shirt, shirt, wool sweater setup with different lights projected from behind them. The photos were taken with different types of cameras.

The one on the left had ambient daylight and was photographed with a regular camera, which picks up visible light only. The one in the middle had an LED lamp behind it. It, too, was photographed with a regular camera. You can barely see the light through the material.

The image on the right shows the same clothing photographed with an infrared
(750–1000 nm) camera designed to pick up only 850 ng light waves from the 54 W 660/850nm Candeer red light therapy LED lamp behind the clothing.

As the authors observed,

This means that you can get the benefits of NIR sunlight right through your clothing. You just have to get out and get in it.

More to come on sunlight as I continue poring over papers. It’s fascinating.

Plant-Based Diets, Hah!

One of the tabs I’ve kept up forever but had forgotten about till I read through my report from Giles was one from Time Magazine in 2024. (Shows you how long I keep tabs open).The article is titled ‘Is Eating a Plant-Based Diet Better for You?’ The article itself is dreck, but I saved it for the last sentence, which is an abomination.

If there is any universal truth in journalism, it is that the woman who wrote that is an idiot.

A new study came out about a month ago in Cell Metabolism, an influential journal, showing just the opposite. I’ve had it up in a tab, too, and have been waiting to write about it.

I’m not going to go into any great detail, because it’s pretty easy to read and understand. The graphic abstract below pretty well sums up the findings of the paper titled ‘Effect of diet macronutrient content on the cardiometabolic response to weight loss: A randomized clinical trial’. But we’ll go a little deeper to root out some of the findings that may need a bit of explaining.

As you can see, three groups of subjects went on one of three different diets: a very-low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet, a Mediterranean diet, or a very-low-fat plant-forward diet. After withdrawals from the study (which always happens), there were 14 subjects who completed each diet.

The goal was achieving a 10 percent weight loss. The diets were all three constructed to contain 2,000 calories. It took about five months for the subjects to lose 10 percent of their body weight. Then there was a three- to four-week maintenance program.

As you can see from the graphic above, the very-low-carb ketogenic diet triumphed in spectacular fashion. There were a handful of measurements in which the other diets tied with the VLC ketogenic diet, but none that trumped it. But there were plenty of categories in which the VLC ketogenic diet blew the others out of the water.

Before I get to a couple of specifics, let’s look at how the three diets were put together.

Take a look at the fat grams, saturated fat grams, and cholesterol in the VLC ketogenic diet as compared to the others. A huge difference.

I would like to focus on a couple of other findings.

First let’s look at the data on muscle insulin sensitivity and hepatic (liver) insulin sensitivity.

If you look at the top of this graphic, you can see the change in insulin sensitivity of muscle and liver driven by the different diets. Notice that muscle insulin sensitivity changed markedly as a consequence of all the diets. Which is a terrific improvement. But take a look at the difference in liver insulin sensitivity between the diets.

You can see that it changed massively with the VLC Keto diet, but not so much with the other two. There was a change, but not such a dramatic change as with the VLC Keto.

Muscle insulin sensitivity is important, because insulin binds to the GLUT-4 receptors to move GLUT-4 transporters to the surface of the muscle cells to grab glucose and pull it in to be used as energy. But, and this is a big but, glucose can infuse into muscle cells without being carried by GLUT-4 transporters. And the harder the muscle works, the more glucose that infuses in.

This is why people with type 1 diabetes have to reduce their insulin doses when they exercise. If they’re not careful, the combination of the glucose seeping into the muscle cells on its own and the glucose being transported in via GLUT-4 driven by the injected insulin can run blood sugar dangerously low, which can lead to unconsciousness.

Insulin and the liver is another story.

Insulin does not need to “open the door” for glucose to enter the hepatic cells. GLUT-2 transporters bring it in, and unlike the muscle, do not require insulin to do so.

Instead, insulin regulates what happens inside the liver. Insulin promotes glucose storage and use and helps suppress hepatic glucose production. Insulin influences enzymatic expression and glycogen metabolism, while also acting through pathways that put the brakes on glucose output.

Hepatic insulin resistance is not primarily a failure to move glucose into liver cells. A liver cell can remain readily permeable to glucose while the liver fails to suppress glucose production appropriately or handles incoming glucose abnormally. That is why insulin-independent entry into the liver and insulin-dependent liver glucose regulation are entirely compatible.

Glucose flows in on its own while the liver can still be making glucose like crazy.

Most people believe that the elevated blood sugar in diabetes is caused by carbohydrates coming in via the diet. But the vast majority of the elevated sugar as a consequence of that disease enters the blood because the liver makes it. Insulin regulates the liver’s production of glucose. When the liver cells are sensitive to insulin, it takes just a bit of insulin to shut off the production and release of glucose.

When the liver cells are resistant to the effects of insulin, they then produce glucose like mad.

Which is why liver insulin sensitivity is much more important than muscle insulin sensitivity.

Look again at the graphic above and note part B.

Part B shows that all diets substantially reduced the fat content of liver cells, which is terrific. Fatty liver is all too common and causes many health issues, so getting rid of the fat in the liver is a good thing, and all the diets did it about equally.

But there is a huge difference in actual liver function as a consequence of the two diets. In the second panel from the left in part B, you can see the massive reduction in sugar release (called endogenous glucose production) from the liver cells. And if you look at the far right, you’ll also see a major reduction in the production and release of fat from the liver cells, a process called de novo lipogenesis, driven by the VLC Keto diet. The Mediterranean diet helps some, but the highly-touted Plant-forward diet didn’t do squat.

We can see this in another graphic I found in the supplemental information buried in the bottom of the study.

As you can see, the VLC Keto diet had the lowest total insulin, which is called the AUC (area under the insulin curve) and measures the total insulin secreted in a given time period. This chart also shows how that correlates with total DNL (de novo lipogenesis). Once again, it’s obvious that after the VLC Keto diet, the Mediterranean diet comes in second and the mighty Plant forward diet sucks at third.

While we’re rooting through the supplemental info, let’s look at another couple of graphics that didn’t make it into the body of the paper.

First, take a look at this one that reports adherence to the three diets.

As you can see, adherence to the VLC Keto diet was the best of all, though not all that different from the other two. But how many times have you heard that ketogenic diets are great and all, but they’re just impossible to stick to? Well, this table refutes that. At least during the time course of this study.

Next, let’s look at this myth buster.

How many times have you heard people say, “Oh, that low-carb diet will ruin your kidneys”? More than a few, I suspect. I’ve heard it a zillion times.

If you look at the first line of the graphic above, you’ll see that the GFR (glomerular filtration rate – a measure of kidney function) improved more on the VLC Keto diet than either of the others.

The two lines below the top one list the creatinine and cystatin C measurements during the course of the study. Creatinine is the standard that almost all docs use to determine kidney function via a blood test. The lower, the better. As you can see, the measurements are the same (the Plant forward diet was a tiny bit lower, but essentially they are the same).

The third line down shows the cystatin C values. Most docs don’t even know this one exists. The creatinine measurement above it can be influenced by protein intake. Eat a lot of protein, especially when you’re older, and you can see an increase in creatinine. Cystatin C does not have the dietary protein interference issue. As you can see, the cystatin C is a bit lower in those following the VLC Keto diet. But not by much.

So, don’t worry about your kidneys on a low-carb diet.

Now let’s get back to the main part of the paper. First, let’s look at a busy table.

Sorry about the tiny print on this one, but it was the only way I could copy it. If you go to the actual online paper, you can scroll down and get it in a much larger size.

Look at the first two items I have highlighted in yellow.

The first one shows the change in fasting insulin levels on the three diets. As you can see, the changes driven by the VLC Keto diet are significantly larger than those of the other two diets, with, of course, the Plant forward diet, the darling of the know-nothing health journalists, coming in dead last.

The second highlighted line shows the changes in HOMA-IR scores. This is a commonly used calculation to measure insulin resistance. Again, it’s pretty obvious which of the three diets reduced insulin resistance the most. (The lower the number, the better.) The VLC Keto takes the metaphorical cake (or maybe it should be steak) on this one, too.

The third measurement I’ve highlighted further down in this table shows the change in the LP-IR index. The LP-IR index is a relatively new method of calculating the risk of cardiovascular disease. It uses a number of lipid parameters not found in a typical lipid panel. The higher the number, the greater the cardiovascular risk.

If you take a look at the change in the LP-IR index over the course of the three diets, you’ll see that following the VLC Keto diet brought about the greatest reduction in risk while following the Plant Forward diet occasions the least.

The VLC Keto diet reduced LP-IR index by 21 points, the Mediterranean diet by 7 points, and the Plant Forward diet by a simpering 2 points.

Now, remember, the VLC Keto diet contained the most fat, most saturated fat, and the most cholesterol, yet it vastly lessened the risk for cardiovascular disease compared to the other two. It wasn’t even close.

Okay, one more graphic and we’re out of here. This one is mine. I made it based on the change in triglycerides and HDL-cholesterol as shown in Table 1 above.

As I’ve written about before in a few earlier editions of The Arrow, the ratio of triglycerides divided by HDL is an excellent predictor of cardiovascular disease risk. The lower the ratio, the better. You can see from the chart above that the changes in the triglyceride to HDL ratio were huge in the VLC Keto group compared to the others.

Especially compared to the Plant Forward diet. How huge? The change in the VLC Keto group was twice that of the Mediterranean diet group and over ten times greater than that of the Plant Forward group!

One of the real take-home lessons from this study is that all these improvements came about with the same amount of weight loss!

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve told colleagues about how much my patients reduce countless risk factors, lower their blood sugar levels, and improve lipids on low-carbohydrate diets that I’ve gotten some version of the following response: Of course they get better. They lost weight. That’s what did it. Not the low-carb diet.

Well, this study puts paid to that. All the subjects lost the same amount of weight, yet they had vastly different risk-factor reductions.

Even the authors of this study fell into the weight-loss-caused-it trap.

This study should be used by all docs to give their patients a roadmap to better health. Losing weight with a VLC Keto diet (or, in my opinion, just a plain old low-carb diet) brings about an enormous array of health improvements along with weight loss. This paper lays it all out.

One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Bishop Desmond Tutu, goes like this:

As this paper demonstrated, diets such as the VLC ketogenic diet tested (and countless other low-carb diets that have been studied) can be used to “pull people out of the river” of bad health.

But these same kinds of diets, followed even less rigorously, can keep people from falling into the river in the first place.

As my bout with cancer taught me, it’s much easier to stay trim than it is to get trim once you’ve got some excess fat on you. I lost about 50 pounds during my ordeal, and since getting through it, I’ve gained 40 back. I've found it much easier to maintain my new lower weight than it was to get rid of the extra 10 pounds I had been carrying for years. Remember, 10 pounds is about the equivalent of two gallons of fat.

Before we go, let’s discuss the shortcomings of this study.

The only issue I have with it is that it did not recruit more subjects. But these kinds of studies are extremely expensive. In this one, the researchers provided all the food for the subjects and paid for all the labwork. You can see from the many, many labs done how expensive this would be.

Paying for all this food for forty something people for months and forking over for all their testing and labs is not inconsequential. Plus the funds to pay for all the people who interacted with the subjects is costly.

It would have been great to have had a hundred subjects in each arm of the study. It would have been even better to have had a thousand. But no one would fund it. Researchers have to go with what they can afford.

When I took a look at the funding for the study, here is what I found.

In my view, the NIH should be funding studies like this one that are extremely important, but don’t have any way to get industry funding. Neither Big Food nor Big Pharma will profit from this study, so they’re not likely to fork over the money to do it.

One last point. This study wasn’t done by a clinic full of low-carb docs. (There probably isn’t such a thing.) It was done at Washington University, one of the major medical centers in the United States.

Odds and Ends

• Why the average human body temperature it lower today than it was 150 years ago.

• Bizarre goings on in a Florida mobile home park. I would love to know the outcome. Will the couple still marry?

• Interesting take on the system being rigged by a Hollywood insider. Explains why Taylor Sheridan has never won an Emmy despite producing some of the most watched and best shows on TV.

• Chihuahuas hold a big surprise. The breed is part coyote.

• Britain's only free-standing pharaonic building has looked like plain beige sandstone for years. From mid-November, Oxford's Ashmolean will project the original colors onto the 2,700-year-old Shrine of Taharqa, Egyptian blue and all.

• Goodbye is just a hurried "God be with ye," which first showed up around the 1570s as "godbwye."

• Archaeologists just pulled a 3,300-year-old bronze sword from Italy's Lake Mezzano, and they swear it's still sharp. It's the third sword that lake has given up since the 1970s.

• The Japanese have a word, tsundoku, for buying books and never reading them. Many, I’m sure, do this. I, myself, at least read part of every book I purchase.

• The fluffernutter wasn't invented by a sugar-crazed kid. It started as a 1918 marshmallow-creme marketing ploy, and plenty of "traditional" holiday foods came out of corporate test kitchens, too.

• Among these vanishing fixtures of 1970s life are telephone cords, TV dials, and taking the phone off the hook to be left alone, which sounds nice. I suppose I could just turn off my iPhone. But…

• It’s about time. The FAA plans to replace decades-old floppy-disk technology by 2028 at more than 400 air traffic control facilities in the country.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

I had a video offered up to me a few days ago of Luciano Pavarotti singing Nesun Dorma, which was lovely, but it’s kind of over played. But it reminded me of the first house MD and I bought in Little Rock. We purchased it for a song, because it was kind of run down and needed a lot of work.

The two of us did most of the renovating. Back then there were no CDs and no streaming, but we had a cheap stereo set with a turntable. One of the records we listened to over and over during the renovation ordeal with Pavarotti’s Favourite Neapolitan Songs.

One of the things we bring up every now and then was an experience we had at about 1 am while wall papering. Pavarotti was blasting on the stereo, and I said to MD, I’ll bet we are the only two people living in Little Rock, Arkansas who are listening to Pavarotti right now while wall papering. It has become a joke between us since then.

Anyway, my favorite on the album was ’O surdato ’nnammurato. I found a live version. You can watch it below. I always marvel at how Pavarotti can sing as he does and do it so apparently effortlessly.

Enjoy.

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back soon.

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This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

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